Powering, Puzzling, or Persuading? The Mechanisms of Building Institutional Orders

This article offers an agent-centered constructivist analysis of institution building; that of the “first” New Deal of the National Recovery Administration. It argues that in moments of uncertainty generated by the failure of existing institutions, institutional choice becomes underdetermined by structure and open to attempts at creative and underdetermined inter-elite persuasion. What matters in such moments are the locally generated “crisis-defining” ideas at hand rather than simply the ostensible material positions of the actors in question. How this process took place in the U.S. is compared with both similar historical cases and alternative materialist models. An alternative model is developed, and in conclusion it is suggested why periods of deflation may be particularly open to inter-elite attempts at persuasion.